a tall tale to be told soon...

This past summer I met god. Or to be more honest, I became god, breaking through the final onion-peal layer of selfhood to realize for one clear moment the total interconnection of all being. Call it samadhi, nirvana, illumination, the ain sof or, whatever; for me it felt like all the veils of reality had been stripped away and for the first time I could truly experience life in all its limitless mystery and glory, without shielding my eyes.

When LVX23 asked me to write up this experience and what led to it for key23, I first thought it would be an easy task. In the months following the event I had already begun to write an account, and thought this would just be a matter of some editing and a few additions. But on rereading it I realized that I have much more work ahead of me if I am going to honestly talk about what happened. This is not as simple as just saying I ate some cactus and saw god, for my expereince stemmed directly from all the questing and small revelations I've had over the past few years, if not over my whole life. My account was already an eighteen page exposition and had not even gotten to the experience itself when I stopped writing it. Granted, I have a tendancy of being long-winded, and I would rather tell a good story then skimp through a bare-bones outline, but for me this experience could only have happened by working through years of fear, love, uncertainty, madness, dreams, insights. I had to free all the dark, closed off parts of my soul in order to be light.

Each event of the past several years, even the smallest ones, carried a lesson, a hint at what would happen, and it was only through taking these small insights and tying them together again and again from every imaginable angle that I eventually reached the point of understanding that was my experience. From this side of it I see that they were all ripples, broken reflections of truth, cast out by this vast stone skipping across the watery face of my reality. Whether the cause or effect or refraction of my experience, these small revelations were a necessary and integral part of it and key to my understanding of what happened. Is it possible to talk about this without them? I don't know.

Do people really want to hear of my failed loves and sore attempts at communicating with and relating to others, of the twisted labyrinthian dreams that haunted my sleep and every waking moment, of the struggle of having to relearn such simple truths as breathing? Or would the details just obscure the clarity of my retelling? So many accounts of entheogenic and revealatory experiences try to get to the point too quiickly, and do not do justice to the experience or the situations from which it arose. But this was the most meaningful, the most real thing that has ever happened to me (yet), and I want to impart the full import of this in my telling, so that others might find understanding in their own lives. Or if they have, will be encouraged to share all in return.

And so I must ask: Do you want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (at least the truth I found)? Or should I skip right to the juicy bits that while just as true may leave you feeling a bit confused, skepticle, and let down without the full story to give them the meaning I found? My life is yours for the taking, if you would have it. Most of it has already been written anyway, and though long and often non-linear it is hopefully as enjoyable and insightful to read as it was to live.